Ayobami Emmanuel Omolusi.

Migration policy has long been designed around the individual — the single person fleeing poverty, conflict, or climate. But my research shows that migration is fundamentally a collective phenomenon. People do not move alone; they move through networks, following information passed down from those who went before them.

In our ACM 2025 paper, we showed how social dynamics — peer influence, platform-driven coordination, and information cascades — shape not just whether people migrate, but where they go. A person in Lagos is more likely to end up in a city where their cousin's neighbour went than in a city with better economic prospects they read about online.

For policymakers, this changes everything. Interventions must target network dynamics, not just individual incentives. Public information campaigns must understand that a message from a trusted peer outweighs a government pamphlet by orders of magnitude.

Collective intelligence, in this context, is not a metaphor. It is the actual computational process by which millions of people process risk, opportunity, and social proof — and arrive at movement decisions that reshape continents.

Before I ran a single regression, I sat across from people and listened.

Thirty-four of them, in rooms and corridors and cafés across Rabat — Nigerians, mostly young, mostly male, carrying the weight of a decision that had changed everything. I asked them one question to start: Why did you leave?

The answers were never simple. Nobody said 'poverty' and stopped. They said 'my brother went first.' They said 'I saw the videos on YouTube and I thought it would be different.' They said 'everybody from my street was going.'

What struck me most was how social the decision was. Migration — in policy discussions — is often framed as an individual rational choice. But in every conversation I had, other people were central. A cousin who sent money back. A WhatsApp group that shared routes. A pastor who warned them not to go by sea.

The data I collected told one story. The conversations told a richer one. This piece is about the gap between them — and why closing that gap is the most important thing a migration researcher can do.

I play keyboard on Sunday mornings.

There is a moment, if you have ever been in a room full of people worshipping together, where something shifts. It is hard to name. The voices align. The rhythm becomes shared. People who arrived carrying separate burdens somehow begin to move as one.

As a researcher of collective intelligence, I find this deeply interesting — not as mysticism, but as science. What is happening in that room is a form of distributed cognition. People are syncing their attention, their emotional state, their breath. The information being processed is not just acoustic; it is social, embodied, spiritual.

Long before we built algorithms to aggregate human intelligence, we built rituals. Worship, in its many forms across cultures, is one of the oldest technologies for producing collective coherence. Anthropologists have documented this for centuries. What I find less documented is what it feels like from the inside — to be simultaneously a participant and a researcher.

I believe faith and science are not enemies here. They are studying the same phenomenon from different angles: how human beings, in their incompleteness, manage to build something larger than themselves.

When I graduated with a B.Sc in Chemistry from the University of Ibadan, I did not know what Collective Intelligence was.

I knew I liked understanding how things worked — how atoms bonded, how reactions proceeded, how order emerged from apparent chaos. What I did not yet know was that these same questions could be asked about people.

The scholarship that brought me to Morocco felt like a leap into the unknown. I was going to study something called Collective Intelligence at a university I had only seen online. I was leaving Nigeria, my church, my family, everything familiar. What I found at UM6P was that the questions I had always been asking — about emergence, about structure, about how small interactions produce large outcomes — were alive in a completely different domain.

Migration became my laboratory. Not because I planned it, but because I was living it. I was a Nigerian in Morocco, watching other Nigerians arrive, navigate, struggle, adapt. The researcher and the subject were never fully separate.

The detour from Chemistry to Collective Intelligence was not a detour at all. It was the same road, with better questions.

Before any official policy reaches a migrant in transit, an informal algorithm has already run.

It runs through WhatsApp groups where routes are shared and dangers flagged. It runs through phone calls between someone in Rabat and someone still in Lagos, weighing whether the journey is worth it. It runs through the carefully curated Instagram posts of people who made it — and the silences of those who did not.

This is the algorithm of survival. It is decentralised, adaptive, and remarkably efficient at aggregating information across thousands of individual experiences into actionable guidance. It is also frequently wrong, frequently exploited by smugglers, and frequently the difference between life and death.

My research sits at the intersection of collective intelligence and migration precisely because I believe this informal system deserves serious scientific attention. Not to surveil it, not to disrupt it, but to understand it — and to design better, more humane information environments that can complement it.

The migrants I spoke to were not passive. They were active information processors, running complex social computations under conditions of extreme uncertainty. The least we owe them is to take that seriously.